films:
Discreet Charm of Propaganda: Ladies to the Left, Gentlemen to the Right

title/director

Gender has an agenda? We tend to believe that commercials and television brainwash, politicians manipulate, and corporations mold us into obedient robots. Then why are most people still suspicions, even hostile, toward any questioning or critical analysis of the sexual order? Probably because we have been inculcated with it since birth, so when we begin to consciously perceive the world, we deem gender roles as "natural." While boys will be boys, girls must be proper ladies; what can be shown off, and where we can’t touch: injunctions, prohibitions, barriers, divisions. Since this indoctrination directly affects the body, it becomes deeply ingrained within it and contesting it seems to contradict the very matter we are made of.
Some time ago, researchers differentiated biological sex from cultural gender. The latter shifts over time and space, and depends on numerous cultural factors. It is subject to institutions that wield symbolic and real power - the church, the state, family – because one of the ways to maintain the status quo is to control physicality and sexuality of loyal believers, citizens, children ... and maybe viewers?
Cinema plays a dual role in gender machinations. Dependent on money and usually targeting a mass audience, film usually toes the official line, reproduces stereotypes and morals. At the same time, it sometimes raises the uncomfortable questions, smuggles rebellious heroes onto our screens, and presents a rebellious attitude, something it has become increasing bold at since the counterculture rebellion of the mid-1960s.
Our review is a short, gender-themed journey through decades of cinema. We hope it will highlight changes in the on-screen portrayal of men, women, and sexual minorities. There is room here for iconic rebels, e. g. Marlene Dietrich or Jean Genet, educational films made to entrench cultural norms, as well as gays from the Balkans and a Polish playboy. No one should feel discriminated.
Bartosz Żurawiecki